John Tottenham's Anomic Otiosities

In which the author examines the rotting corpse of punk:

I couldn’t take it anymore: I left during X’s set. The celebratory angst of We’re Desperate faded into the Temple street gloom as I walked past the recycling centers and junkyard dogs leaping at their fences. I had left suddenly, without attempting to search for my ride in the sea of bald and graying heads. The geriatric punk rock extravaganza was winding down. It had been exhausting.

Thirty-five years ago, back in the stale and decadent 70’s, this sort of reunion show – a gathering of the true believers (the eternal adolescents) assembling for a self-congratulatory wallow in a shared past – was exactly the sort of morbid exercise punk was supposed to abolish. A 35-year-old (let alone a 65-year-old) playing rock n’roll seemed an absurd figure back then. But times have changed. Rock n’roll is an old man’s game these days: a toothless old dog going through the motions, imagining it still has bite.

The connection between the art world and the early punk scene has already been avidly documented. Many of the major California artists of the last 30 years – Mike Kelley, Gary Panter, Raymond Pettibon – emerged out of it, and a lot of the musicians themselves possess legit art world cred. ‘Under the Big Black Sun’, the title of the PST-related MOCA show with which the concert was concurrent, was named after an X record. Many punk pioneers, both here and in England, were art-school-educated, and once the scene expanded beyond its initial bohemian roots and grew into a genuine phenomenon, many of the instigators moved into more exploratory and musically sophisticated areas.

And just when you thought they’d made a dignified exit, here they are again.

Penelope Houston, a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute – who, when she’s not making folk records, works as a librarian – is bouncing around the stage like a particularly spiky aerobics instructor, goading on her class of doddering converts with lively renditions of Teenage Rebel and Fuck You, while gently poking fun at their mutual obsolescence.

Not that I can see much of it from where I am. If you want a drink you have to stand 300 yards away, behind a fence, in a strictly monitored bar area. A rigorously enforced no-containers rule is in effect, although there’s not much chance of a riot breaking out in this mob: I’ve seen more young people at a Stones show.

Certainly, it’s fun for a 55-year-old to let off steam onstage, but to what extent can the singer still relate to the song? More willfully than any other musical movement, punk was all about youth and rebellion. Giving the people what they want – playing the same songs of ignorance and inexperience that one outgrew the sentiments of decades ago to an audience that has also moved on – defeats the original purpose. But the original purpose is no longer relevant. It’s comforting now: exactly what punk was supposed to serve as a corrective against, and perhaps more than anything this sort of event can be ascribed to the urge to relive former glories.

As for the young people in the audience – of whom there were several – what was their excuse? Mute admission, perhaps, of the moribundity of contemporary music, and craving a whiff of a pre-commodified time when lines were drawn and rules rewritten, when musical rebellion was still relevant – and still possible.

That gilded gutter age was probably the last time when they didn’t know what to do with us, when the powers that be hadn’t yet learned how to process the strange and sudden cultural upheavals of rebellious young people; before the conveyor belt of youth culture was laid in place with its mass-produced bohemian lifestyles, manufactured sedition and generic youth zones. Therefore it exerts a powerful nostalgic pull as a harder but more innocent time.

No musical movement of comparable significance has taken place since then, mainly because it hasn’t been needed. Punk was the rock n’roll equivalent of the big bang: a necessary purification, purging the 70’s of complacency. Out of a brief period in an aesthetic straitjacket came an attitude that could subsequently be applied to any form of musical or creative endeavor, and it made significant impact on the art world: without it the work of Hirst, Emin, Kippenberger and many others would be unthinkable. But to revisit or attempt to prolong what was essentially a period of transition seems fairly futile, and as is often the case at such affairs, there’s a sense that one is applauding the presence rather than the actual performance, paying homage to the sainted pioneers who created something that has become so much a part of our social fabric that to assign its genesis to real human beings becomes an almost sacred experience: the mystical rite of watching middle-aged men (and women) rocking out in their garages played out in public.

Two years in the punk trenches (first campaign) and you’re set for life. Such is the insatiable hunger for any residue of those halcyon days when the two sevens clashed that anybody associated with it at the time can to some degree cash in now. As is proven by the Jello-less Kennedys – or “the world’s greediest karaoke band,” as their former singer refers to them – with a new vocalist investing Biafra’s lyrics with dubious conviction.

This dispiriting spectacle drives me back into the museum where original Target videos of these bands in their prime are on view in one of the galleries. The archival footage inside the museum is much more compelling than the event taking place in reality outside it. But it’s history now, therefore it must be celebrated, and nothing furnishes more definite proof that something has become officially harmless than the comfortable setting of a museum show.

As I continued down Temple street it occurred to me that cutting out of this event early and walking all the way home down one of the bleakest streets in town at midnight in a three-piece suit was more true to the spirit of punk than anything that had occurred on stage all night. Talk about self-congratulatory.

Artillery 3/12